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Indians Overseas a Guide to Source Materials in the India Office Records for the Study of Indian Emigration 1830-1950

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Indians Overseas a Guide to Source Materials in the India Office Records for the Study of Indian Emigration 1830-1950 Indians Overseas A guide to source materials in the India Office Records for the study of Indian emigration 1830-1950 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 1830-1950 The abolition of slavery by Britain brought about a great migration of Indians from their homeland. This migration was in answer to the need of many former slave- plantation colonies for labour that was cheap and plentiful. From 1830 until 1920 the recruitment of Indians in India to work on the various plantations of the British and French colonies was organised through what became known as the indenture system, and throughout the period it was the responsibility of the Government of India to curb malpractices within the system. While undertaking this difficult task the government often came into collision with the Colonial Office which in its turn had to deal with increasing hostility towards Asiatic labourers in the colonies and the newly created British Dominions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The period from 1920 until 1950 saw the increasing growth of nationalism in India, especially between the two world wars. Indians both at home and abroad were struggling towards freedom and a national identity. In India the struggle was towards home rule and Dominion status, while abroad Indians demanded full rights as citizens of the countries in which they had chosen to settle. Both causes gained in importance because they were espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. It was hoped that the struggle for fairer treatment for Indians abroad would achieve success with Independence in 1947 and with India becoming a republic within the Commonwealth in 1950, but the problem was never resolved satisfactorily in the following decades. 1830 -1920 By 1830 the Industrial Revolution which had changed the material prosperity of Britain had left India economically poor. She was a consumer of British products, and could no longer claim to be a large-scale supplier of cotton goods to Europe. Most production that took place in the country was solely for local consumption. The slump in the cotton industry was accompanied by wide-scale unemployment, which caused many to seek work among the large peasant population of village India. But even the land was not secure, subject as it was to recurrent droughts accompanied by starvation on a huge scale. Thus the Government of India’s proclamation in 1812 that it “should aim to protect the weak from oppression and secure to every individual the fruits of his industry” 1 hardly rang true. The situation in India was ripe for exploitation by British and French planters in the former slave-owning colonies, who wished to adopt the indenture system used by South American planters to obtain Chinese labour from the Portuguese settlement of Macao. Under this system labour was recruited for the planters by their agents to work for a certain period of time (usually five years), during which the employer was legally obliged to provide fixed wages, medical attention and other amenities for the labourers. After the period had elapsed the labourer could either renew his term of employment or return to his native land. To the landless unemployed of India emigration offered hope of work, and they were no strangers to emigration as in the early years of the eighteenth century many of them from the over-populated east coast of the country had crossed to Burma. Indian emigration to Mauritius began as early as 1830, but the labourers selected were described as “people taken from the refuse of the population of Madras”,2 and they were dismissed from the island. Yet on 9 September 1834 thirty-six men of the Dhangar or hill caste voluntarily attached their marks to an agreement in the Calcutta Police Office to work for five years on a sugar estate in Mauritius in return for a salary of Rs.5 per month, with six months’ pay in advance and the payment of their outward and return passages. As the men accepted voluntarily to go to Mauritius the Bengal Government raised no objections.3 From 1 August 1834 to the end of 1835 fourteen ships landed “coolie” labourers from Calcutta in Mauritius, and the West Indian colonies were to follow in the recruitment of free Indian labour. The recruits came mainly from the Tamil areas of Madras in Southern India, from the United Provinces and from Bihar in the north. But to many of the recruits’ new employers there was little difference between their new charges and their former slaves. Governor Nicolay in Mauritius had to inform employers that Sunday work, unlimited hours and corporal punishment were illegal.4 In Calcutta the question of the transportation of Indian labourers was under review by Macaulay’s Law Commission, and in London the anti-slavery committees opposed payment of compensation to Mauritius because the colony had continued the illicit traffic of slaves after the abolition of the trade. Despite this malpractices still occurred within the indenture system, especially in the securing of safe passages for Indian emigrants. In 1837 accounts of disease, death and overcrowding were brought to the attention of the Indian government, and in May of that year the Legislative Council passed Act V, which made Captain F.W. Birch, Superintendent of Police at Calcutta responsible for the control of emigration, his duties being to check the engagements of the indentured labourers, the personal identity of the emigrants and accommodation on board ship. In the same year that Act V was passed John Gladstone, father of the great Liberal leader, and three other planters arranged for the introduction of Indian “coolies” into British Guiana. The Colonial Office felt there was no need for an Order in Council for the admission of the labourers into the colony, and the scheme itself was thought “novel”.5 But the Government of India banned all Indian indentured labour to the colonies until 1838 because of the abuses within the system. However these continued, and even in 1873 J. Geoghegan stated in his report: “that very grave abuses had prevailed in India, emigrants having been in many cases entrapped by force and fraud, and systematically plundered of nearly six months wages, nominally advanced to them but really divided, on pretences more or less transparent, among the predacious crew engaged in the traffic.”6 The Court of Directors of the East India Company also discussed the question of total prohibition of emigration from India and, in 1838, after a meeting called at the Calcutta Town Hall by Thomas Boaz, a minister of the United Chapel there, a petition was presented of the Governor-General in Council protesting against the export of Indian labour and begging the Council to stop the traffic until it could be proved as beneficial to the Indian labourer as to the exporter and the employer.7 Through such protests, mainly by Evangelicals in Britain and India, a proposal was introduced that each Presidency should establish committees to enquire into malpractices in the system, and that the labour-importing colonies should also appoint Committees of Investigation to report on conditions in their areas. It also led to the “Natives of India Protection Bill” which was debated in the House of Commons on 20 July 1838; and the “Times” newspaper entered the fray by declaring the delivering of coolies to the West Indies at £21 a head was a “novel abomination”.8 During the debate Sir George Grey suggested that emigration to the West Indies should be stopped pending a full inquiry, but Sir Robert Peel questioned the right of the Governor-General in Council to stop Indians going overseas and further stated that the Bill should be dropped on the security of a two year ban on emigration, which would also give time to consider if this should be made permanent or not. The debate was halted when Sir George announced that the powers of the Governor-General in Council were being investigated and the House would receive information in due course.9 Act XIV, which was passed in India on 29 May 1839 by the Governor-General’s Council, prohibited emigration for the purposes of manual labour, and persons carrying out such emigration were liable to a fine of Rs. 200 of three months’ imprisonment. The colonial Committees of Investigation began their work at this time and immigration was closed to Mauritius, Demerara, Reunion, Ceylon and Australia. Yet the Committees were by no means a complete safeguard, as in the case of Mauritius where estates were inspected by four local officials with officers from India, and disagreement arose over the conditions under which the Indian labourers were compelled to work. All the officers apart from Charles Anderson, the special magistrate, reported the conditions satisfactory. Anderson declared to the Colonial Secretary in a letter dated 18 November 1838: “With few exceptions they are treated with great and unjust severity, by overwork and personal chastisement; their lodging accommodation is either too confined and disgustingly filthy, or none is provided for them and in cases of sickness [there is] the most culpable neglect”.10 The other members of the committee remained adamant, but were compelled to admit that many immigrants had been deceived as to their conditions of work, some being told that they were going to do ‘gardening’. On the Gladstone estates at Demerara, British Guiana, there were cases of overseers extorting money and assaulting the Indian labourers, whilst the conditions of the estate hospitals, were described as having “such unalleviated wretchedness, such hopeless misery”.11” Many suffered at the hands of their own countrymen employed as overseers on the estates or put in charge of the immigrants on the outward voyages because they could act as interpreters.
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